Just finished it.
Every time I get close to the end of one of her books I regret not writing things down as I go along, timelines and so on to try and work out whodunnit before the big reveal. But I don't think I would ever have guessed this one.
I spoilered myself searching for a key word and saw that Charlotte had died in the results. Didn't look closely but guessed it was suicide rather than breast cancer.
Came up with various outlandish theories about what the big twist might be. One of them which thankfully turned out not to be it was that I wondered whether Mazu might have been a secret half sibling of Strike and Lucy's, but I suppose Leda's taste was rock stars, not nonces. I really thought Mazu was going to be central to the whole thing, that the big reveal was going to be about her origin story. I guess her overall malevolence was a very effective red herring.
At one point Lin was referred to as Lin Pirbright, which confused the hell out of me until I did a word search and saw it only appeared once so I figured it must be a typo.
My overall feeling is that yet again, JKR has managed to write another absolutely enormous pageturner which on the face of it has nothing to do with the subject for which she is currently famous for having VERY STRONG OPINIONS, but manages nevertheless to say quite a lot about it. In no particular order, massive safeguarding failures being overlooked because no one wants to be called out for bigotry, mass brainwashing of people to believe absolute nonsense or at least pretend to believe it because they're afraid to speak out, the way vulnerable people such as kids from troubled backgrounds or with autism are particularly susceptible, women in the role of handmaidens and collaborating in their own abuse, the tactics of controlling language and alienating vulnerable people from their families, and probably so many other things I have forgotten about or just missed.
I felt incredibly stressed during the build up to Robin going undercover, what with the ever-present threat of rape, particularly given her own history. The whole time she was in there was truly nail biting, and although I felt myself unclench a bit when she came out, there was still quite a lot of plot left to happen. But I think at least at that point I was reasonably confident she would make it to the end of the book without being raped, which is the thing I really did not want to see happen.
Cherie's suicide was just awful, and learning about her role in Daiyu's death didn't really lessen the blow of that for me, because as far as those two little girls were concerned she was just their mummy.
And all those trafficked babies. God, the scale of it is just incredible. All those lives torn apart by it all.
I think I found this a much more disturbing read than her other books.